The US Housing Bust and Soaring Oil Prices: What Next for the World Economy?

Abstract

This paper estimates the impact of the ongoing housing bust and oil price boom on the US and European economies. It finds that large house price movements (changes in construction investment) are useful to predict exceptionally bad and good times for the US economy, but not for most large European countries. In Europe housing market developments have led to extreme values of GDP, mainly in the UK, Spain and some Nordic countries. Exceptionally good or bad times are defined as realisations of the output gap (the difference between actual and trend GDP) that fall in the 5% tail of the distribution. Our definition of a ‘bad time’ thus does not necessarily imply a recession, which is officially defined as two consecutive quarters of falling GDP (and employment). A prolonged period of sub par growth could also lead to an equivalent output gap. Our model allows us to estimate the probability of the US and European economies experiencing exceptionally bad times. We find that the probability for the US is over 50% if one assumes that house prices will continue to fall throughout 2008. Adding the high oil price to the picture increases this probability to over 80%.